Stephen Fox says he’s always had a fascination with “light within the nighttime landscape,” and with series like “The Drive-Ins,” the painter explores a place where luminosity has a particular role to play. Nostalgia comes through not only in the setting, but the classic films he chooses to portray. The artist has spent decades playing with light in oil paintings.
“ … When I was seven years old, I’d play an outdoor game with friends, where at dusk we had to dodge the headlight beams of cars coming into the neighborhood, diving behind trees or into ditches when the light was about to find us,” the artist says. “I didn’t have past events like this on my mind when I began to paint nighttime subjects in the early 1980s, but the attraction was definitely there, a kind of calling. How strange now, that I sometimes find myself collecting images out in a darkened landscape, where the headlights or tail lights of a passing car are the magic ingredient that enlivens a scene for a few moments, turning it into something I wish to paint.”
See more of the artist’s recent work below.
